A Great Idea at the Time

by Alex Beam

  “Mr. President, I understand that you and Mr. Adler are reading and discussing great books with the very young at the rate of one a week. I don’t see how you can do that. When I was a senior at Harvard, it took us a whole year to study Dante’s Divine Comedy under Professor Grandgent.”

  Mortimer Adler and Milton Mayer teach the Great Books at “Mr. Hutchins’s university.” TIME & LIFE PICTURES / GETTY IMAGE

  Hutchins’s reply came quick as lightning and was stunning because of its speed: “The difference, Professor Shorey, is that our students are bright.”

  Adler merchandises much the same anecdote, although his encounter takes place on the Midway Plaisance, the broad, Olmsted-landscaped garden mall that bisects the Chicago campus. He gleefully described to a friend how a pillar of the Chicago Philosophy Department bearded him one day after lunch:

  “You aren’t having your students read Hegel’s Phenomenology, are you?”

  To which I answered, “Sure, why not?” “Oh,” he said, “I’ve never been able to understand it.”

  And I replied, “Well, then, they certainly should fail to understand at least as well as you.”

  The Great Books seminar had its desired effect. Chicago was no longer Mr. Harper’s or Mr. Rockefeller’s university. It was Mr. Hutchins’s university. Harold Swift said that he and the trustees took “a gamble on youth and brilliancy” by hiring Hutchins, and the gamble was paying off. Chicago craved attention, and it was getting attention. Even before the stock market crash that coincided almost exactly with Hutchins’s arrival on campus, the trustees assumed that Hutchins would be a magnet for alumni giving and for foundations grants.

  He was. The president’s office was ground zero for big ideas. Hutchins tried to merge the U. of C. with Northwestern University, twenty-five miles away on the other side of the city. The notion that Chicago would swallow up all of Northwestern’s graduate departments, and that Northwestern would take all of Chicago’s undergrads, was dead on arrival. Later, a wealthy patron offered to endow an engineering school, and Hutchins turned him down flat. “Hutchins had a certain disdain of material things,” historian William McNeill wrote, “and perhaps felt that engineering was a trade more than a profession.”

  The young president gained national fame, and regional infamy, for eliminating the university’s storied football program, the Monsters of the Midway, once coached by the legendary Amos Alonzo Stagg, who enjoyed tenure at Chicago’s Department of Physical Culture and Athletics. That took guts. “Football dominated undergraduate life every fall,” McNeill wrote. “The worth of university, in their eyes, and in those of most of the citizens of Chicago, was measured mainly by athletic success.” But the team that had produced the nation’s first Heisman Trophy winner was losing money and losing games. In its final year, it lost 61-0 to Harvard, 85-0 to Michigan, and even to humble Beloit. Hutchins, a confirmed sybarite—“Whenever I feel like exercising, I lie down until that feeling goes away,” he once said—unleashed his mordant wit on the football boosters, memorably declaring that “[f]ootball is to education as bullfighting is to agriculture.” “There are two ways to have a great university,” Hutchins thundered. “It must have either a great football team or a great president.” On behalf of Chicago, he chose.

  Chicago suddenly became the most talked-about university in America. In 1935, Time magazine splashed Hutchins’s face on its cover and spared no horses hailing the “golden boy of U.S. education.” Before television news, Time and its sister publication, Life magazine, were the news, along with radio and the daily newspaper. He shared its pages with the most pressing news, gossip, and diversions of the day. In the same issue with Hutchins on the cover, Time reported that the fledgling Nazi dictatorship was working on the economic subversion of the Polish city of Danzig, which it would annex four year later, on the second day of World War II; that conductor Arturo Toscanni had just met Mickey Mouse; and “Eleanor Roosevelt Spends a Night in the White House,” doubtless some arcane “in” joke.

  In its cover story Time gushed, “A lucid, original mind, engaging presence and quiet, incisive delivery make Bob Hutchins one of the ablest and most popular public speakers in the land.” The breathless prose went on and on: “Hutchins, once the youngest and handsomest big-university president in the land, is now only the handsomest. After six years of guiding a great university through Depression he stands not on his promise but on his performance.”

  Time-Life founder Henry Luce was a college classmate of the “prodigious Yaleman Hutchins,” as Time called him. Luce’s stable of magazines, Time, Life, and Fortune, would churn out generally uncritical agitprop on Hutchins and Adler and the Great Books for decades. In this outing, Hutchins reaped full credit for the innovative New Plan: “The Plan works,” Time reported, while admitting that “there are no tangible tests of success for such a scheme.” And more: “Applicants write in from all corners of the land, half of them saying they want to enter the University of Chicago solely because of the New Plan. Given a chance to proceed under their own steam, students have found that learning is exciting. They pile into extra lecture sessions just for the fun of it.” The lengthy profile ended with a juicy tidbit: that Washington “was rife with rumors that [Hutchins] was slated for a front-rank New Deal job.” These rumors, which were true, would persist throughout Roosevelt’s years in office; Hutchins whispered for a seat on the Federal Communications Commission. Hutchins bruited for the Securities and Exchange Commission. In the end, Hutchins and Roosevelt could never close the deal. FDR needed a political commitment from the high-minded university president, but party politics was one game Hutchins just couldn’t play.

  Glamour on the Midway: Robert and Maude Hutchins leave a university function. DEPARTMENT OF SPECIAL COLLECTIONS, UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO

  In 1935, Hutchins was pure box office, and his beautiful, standoffish wife added to his mystique. “Maude Hutchins has been roundly criticized for snobbishness,” Time wrote, but promptly excused her reserve: She was an artist “with a mind of her own . . . who ably sculpts and draws.” Hutchins’s biographer Harry Ashmore was less charitable, calling Maude “constitutionally disinterested in most of mankind.” Two years after Time visited, Maude scandalized the university by sending out a Christmas card with a nude drawing of her young daughter Franja on the front. There is no recorded reaction from Hutchins, although this might have been the first public hint of trouble in paradise. Later in life, Hutchins explained why he never wrote an autobiography: “What could I say about my first marriage?”

  Hutchins had a droll sense of humor that rarely failed to charm. In his very first speech to students, he proclaimed, “To become President of a University with a student body so numerous, so intelligent, and, may I add, so handsome would be gratifying to anyone in education.” He teased Adler about overteaching St. Thomas Aquinas, “lest auld Aquinas be forgot.” Hutchins spent plenty of time putting the arm on the Harold Swifts and the Marshall Fields of the world, all the while maintaining a healthy cynicism about fund-raising. He defined a “donor as a ‘rich man who preferred professors to racehorses.’” In his desk drawer, Hutchins kept a sign that he pulled out only occasionally, presumably when Swift, the chairman of the board of trustees, was absent. The sign read, “We launder dirty money.”

  The future novelist Saul Bellow, who attended U. of C. for two years and later went to work for Adler, cottoned to Hutchins and “his incomparable WASP grandeur”: “An Aristotelian and a Thomist, he saw to it that the huge fortunes amassed in slaughter-houses and steel mills were spent teaching generations of students the main achievements of Western culture.”

  When Bellow and his friend Isaac Rosenfeld arrived in New York as hot-to-succeed young intellectuals,

  [f]or some reason neither Isaac nor I could think of ourselves as provincials in New York. Possibly the pride of R. M. Hutchins shielded us. For him the U. of C. didn’t have to compete with the Ivy League, it was obviously superior. It never entered our minds that we had los
t anything in being deprived of Eastern advantages. So we came armored in self-confidence, and came to conquer. Ridiculous boys.

  Bellow was more cool-eyed on the subject of Adler:

  I am grateful also to certain academics whose classrooms anticipated the Theater of the Absurd. Mortimer Adler had much to tell us about Aristotle’s Ethics, but I had only to look at him, even as an undergraduate, to see that he had nothing useful to offer on the conduct of life. He lectured on Prudence, or Magnanimity. It was—well, tomfoolery.

  Hutchins and Adler were putting on a show, and they were attracting quite an audience. In the 1930s, the nation passed through Chicago in a way it doesn’t anymore. New Yorkers who were headed for the West Coast on the Century Limited or the Commodore Vanderbilt trains generally stopped in Chicago, often for several nights, before catching the City of Los Angeles or the City of San Francisco to California. Some celebrities headed for the ornate Pump Room at the Ambassador Hotel, ground zero for the newspaper gossip columnists, to be photographed for the wire service syndicates. But others headed for Hyde Park on the South Side, as General Honors 110 became a place to be seen. Hollywood bigs like Orson Welles, Ethel Barrymore, and Lillian Gish found their way to the Hyde Park seminar room. The best-remembered visitor was Gertrude Stein, at the apogee of her fame, who pounced on Adler and Hutchins at a dinner party at the president’s house. The two men arrived at 9:30 P.M., because they had been teaching the seminar, which Stein hadn’t bothered to attend.

  When he walked into his own house, the first voice Hutchins heard was Stein’s.

  “Where have you been, Hutchins, and what have you been doing?”

  Taken aback, Hutchins replied, “Miss Stein, Mr. Adler and I have been teaching the great books.”

  “Don’t call me Miss Stein,” his visitor answered. “Call me Gertrude Stein. What are the great books?”

  One can imagine Hutchins reaching for the martini pitcher while Adler went downstairs and fished their reading list out of his suitcase. Stein perused the list and asked, “Do you read these books in their original language, or in English translations?”

  Hutchins and Adler patiently explained that their underclassmen hadn’t mastered many languages, so they taught the books in translation. Yes, they allowed, some style points were lost in translation, but they meant to expose their charges to the ideas contained in the books.

  “Not so! Not so at all! Greek ideas must be studied in Greek, Latin ideas in Latin, French ideas in French, and so on.”

  Hutchins politely fumbled with a judicious answer, but Adler—who knew no foreign languages—went on the attack. “The argument grew heated,” he recalled. “Gertrude rose from her chair, came around the table to where I was sitting, and tapping me on the head with a resounding thwack, said, ‘I am not going to argue with you any further, young man. I can see you are the kind of young man who is accustomed to winning arguments.’”

  At this point Hutchins’s butler entered the dining room to announce, “The police are here.”

  “Have them wait!” Stein dismissed the servant with an imperious wave. It emerged that she had arranged a nighttime ride-along with the Chicago police department.

  As the party broke up, Stein’s companion Alice B. Toklas thanked her hosts profusely. “This has been a wonderful evening. Gertrude has said things tonight that it will take her ten years to understand.”

  Adler was buying none of it. “She was always saying things she did not understand,” he observed, “as well as things she did not know had been said by others.” Ever the gentlemen, he and Hutchins invited Stein to lead the following week’s seminar on The Odyssey.

  “We tried to persuade her to ask the students questions,” he wrote. “[B]ut most of the time she harangued them with extempore remarks about epic poetry which she thought up on the spot, but which none of us, including Gertrude, could understand, then or in the years to come.”4

  FOUR

  GREAT BOOKS GOOD FOR YOU!

  HUTCHINS MADE RUNNING one of the nation’s great universities look easy. Of course it never was, most especially on the money front. The Great Depression radically crimped everyone’s style. Alumni giving and foundation grants fell off. Hutchins took a cut in salary and scaled back the salaries of his administrative staff. For the faculty, he froze salaries, which actually increased the professors’ standard of living in the deflationary economy. However, economic austerity also doomed plans for expansion and most ambitious reforms. Hutchins realized his dream of creating a freestanding, classical college curriculum only in 1942, with the appearance of the brief-lived “Hutchins College.” Breaking with universities across America, the Chicago faculty voted to award the Bachelor of Arts degree after only two years in the college. This controversial decision, quickly undone after Hutchins left campus in 1951, partly validated Hutchins’s and Adler’s insistence on creating a shared liberal arts curriculum for all Chicago undergraduates. But just as important, the two-year college addressed the exigencies of the war. Twenty-year-olds weren’t hanging around frat houses or leafing through Herodotus in 1942. Most were volunteering for the war effort.

  World War II granted Hutchins what he thought was his greatest wish: a little petri dish of an undergraduate college where men and women could receive the classical education he never had. World War II also rescued the university, as it did the rest of the country, from the Depression. Twenty-two million dollars—two-thirds of the university’s total budget in 1944—came from government contracts. Yet the war also undid Hutchins, in a twist of fate worthy of his beloved Greek dramas. Casually, almost unknowingly, Hutchins made a decision that changed the course of history, and cast a pall over the rest of his life.

  The Roosevelt administration had a secret project to harness the still-hypothetical power of the split atom for warfare, code-named the Metallurgical Project. The important research was diffuse, being carried out at Columbia, the University of California at Berkeley, in DuPont and Westinghouse corporate laboratories, at a government lab in Tennessee, and at Arthur Holly Compton’s physics lab in Chicago. Compton, a Nobel Prize winner and a renowned academic administrator, suggested centralizing the atomic research in Chicago. He had the clout, he had the excellent lab, and, in the pre-air travel era, he was the most conveniently located. Hutchins okayed the idea, although there is no reason to think that he had much of an idea what the “metallurgists” were up to.

  The outcome was ironical indeed. Hutchins, who had been flirting with isolationism and pacifism before the December 1941 attack on Pearl Harbor, was suddenly playing host to Enrico Fermi, Leo Szilard, J. Robert Oppenheimer, and every A-list atomic scientist in the United States. And where did they build their “pile,” the vast contraption in which they hoped to produce a nuclear chain reaction? Under a bleacher at the university’s abandoned Amos Alonzo Stagg football stadium. Ever since Hutchins had canceled the football program, ample space was available.

  The rest is history. Fermi’s team succeeded in creating a sustained atomic chain reaction at Stagg Field, thanks in large part to Chicago’s astonishing team of “data collectors” and “gadgeteers”—the brilliant research scientists whom Hutchins and Adler had been inveighing against for more than a decade. Most of the scientists quickly decamped for Los Alamos, New Mexico, where the Manhattan Project created the first atom bomb. (It was Chicago chemistry professor Samuel Allison who read out the countdown for Trinity, the first atomic explosion.) The aftershocks of the Chicago work haunted Hutchins for the rest of his life. He became an ardent ban-the-bomber after he left Chicago and always waxed apologetic about his role in the creation of the bomb. “I didn’t really think they were going to be able to do it” was his too-revealing comment after the fact.

  On campus, Hutchins continued to push the classics with ever-greater fervor. He once suggested forcing the U. of C. faculty to study the Great Books: “Outside of the Humanities Division, I doubt that three quarters of our faculty members have ever read a single great book.” A
n instinctual cage-rattler, he once told a friend that if he had written an autobiography, he’d have called it “The Skunk at the Garden Party.” Predictably, his quixotic espousal of bygone scholastic values engendered robust opposition. Some faculty members formed a “Stop Hutchins” committee, in opposition to the “baby president.” His opponents spread rumors that Hutchins and Adler, who simply couldn’t shut up about St. Thomas Aquinas, were plotting to convert the student body to Catholicism. Historian Tim Lacy writes that the Chicago faculty thought Hutchins “was calling for the restoration of the medieval university.”

  It didn’t help that Adler, wildly unpopular with the faculty, had a habit of saying and writing stupid things. In the campus newspaper, he published a lengthy essay called “God and the Professors,” attacking the “anarchic individualism” of the reigning academic ideology. “I say we have more to fear from our professors than from Hitler,” he wrote, idiotically, but not uncharacteristically. He also attracted the wrong kind of attention by coauthoring a faux-artsy, Dadaist nonsense book with Maude Hutchins, widely interpreted as a suck-up move and nothing more. Random House printed 750 copies of Diagrammatics, with line drawings by Mrs. Hutchins and prose like Adler’s “Prayer”: “Blue art thou, O Last, and deeply to raised; blue is thy pagination, and of thy fistula there is no wing.” Mortimer, please.

  But the Great Books idea stayed hot, even if not everyone was on board with the program. One group remained quite perplexed: the university’s trustees. Board chairman Swift stood by Hutchins through thick and thin, but he wasn’t overjoyed about all the commotion emanating from the Midway. It was bad for business—the fund-raising business, that is.